SIDEBAR

Filimone Mabjaia is trying to foster harmony between cultures one concert at a time.

The 34-year-old executive director of the nonprofit music and arts company Matapa has been organizing world music concerts around the city for the past several months and is hosting a series of events called the Roots en Route Festival starting tonight as part of Black History Month.

Mabjaia moved to Hamilton from Maputo Mozambique in 2010 to be with his Canadian-born wife, Jessie Forsyth, a PhD student at McMaster University. They met in Mozambique while she was in that country doing relief work.

He was a music promoter in Africa, but when he came to Canada he saw a different kind of opportunity to promote music with so many different cultural groups in the community.

Mabjaia came to believe that by exposing people to different forms of world music it will help different cultures understand one another. And if they understand one another, he feels, maybe they’ll get along better.

So, rather than simply hosting a sitar player from India for the evening, he’ll mix it together with, say, an ensemble from the Middle East. Then he’ll put both acts on stage at the end of the night and tell them to jam together.

This is precisely what he will do with a concert Matapa is hosting in late March — date and time are being finalized — at the Hamilton Conservatory of Music that features The Light of East Ensemble and Irshad Khan. He did this with Cheri Maracle from Six Nations and Trinity Mpho from Botswana at a concert in November at the Art Gallery of Hamilton.

In January, he had the Roberto Lopez band, a Colombian jazz ensemble, jam with classical guitarist Emma Rush.

“It’s a great way to start to learn about each other’s culture. It’s a great chance to learn more about people who live in the community,” he says.

The idea has had mixed results, he says, but he believes it offers a fascinating opportunity for musicians and symbolizes his larger cultural intentions with audiences.

“You never know what is going to happen because we don’t give the performers a chance to rehearse together. We just bring them on the stage and ask them to play.”

Depending on the cultures represented on the stage, there can be very little common ground. Rhythms, time signatures and scales can be radically different.

Some musicians play by ear others need to have it written out. Some forms of music encourage improvisation, others don’t.